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In the wake of nationwide protests, Big Tech companies such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook have publicly stated their "support of the Black community." On the next Techtonic, Chris Gilliard discusses his recent Fast Company piece that explains how Big Tech companies profit from exploiting and harming the very communities they claim to support.

April 23, 2018: Columbia Business School prof. Len Sherman on business models online

• Where Countries Are Tinderboxes and Facebook Is a Match, by Amanda Taub and Max Fisher in the NYT. “Time and again, communal hatreds overrun the newsfeed — the primary portal for news and information for many users — unchecked as local media are displaced by Facebook and governments find themselves with little leverage over the company. Some users, energized by hate speech and misinformation, plot real-world attacks. ... ‘You report to Facebook, they do nothing,’ one of the researchers, Amalini De Sayrah, said. ‘There’s incitements to violence against entire communities and Facebook says it doesn’t violate community standards.’”

• Jaron Lanier speaking about Facebook and Google as “behavior modification empires” that “rely on behavior modification and spying” for their business models. It’s cheaper to pay them to ruin things than to make positive change. Perhaps, Lanier says, it’s time for subscription fees. (Hey, it worked for HBO and Netflix!) “I don’t believe our species can survive unless we fix this,” Lanier concludes. “In the meantime, if the companies won’t change, delete your accounts.”

• Interview with Jaron Lanier in New York Magazine: “A lot of the rhetoric of Silicon Valley that has the utopian ring about creating meaningful communities where everybody’s creative and people collaborate and all this stuff — I don’t wanna make too much of my own contribution, but I was kind of the first author of some of that rhetoric a long time ago. So it kind of stings for me to see it misused. Like, I used to talk about how virtual reality could be a tool for empathy, and then I see Mark Zuckerberg talking about how VR could be a tool for empathy while being profoundly nonempathic, using VR to tour Puerto Rico after the storm, after Maria. One has this feeling of having contributed to something that’s gone very wrong.”

Changed clothes from random feces I got all over my clothes via my garden hose, and got back to work, and realized there are still some in my shoe treads. Sock footed at work scrubbing my shoes (Big Fun!)

Uncertain how better Netflix subscription model is. They are rather bouyed by stock valuation than subscriptions. Additionally, they have deep metrics on viewership as to what people will watch and develop accordingly.

CrowdFunding...What I wonder: Ultimate organic Socialism - or Libertarianism - ?? The idea that an unregulated Market is some kind of Natiural state - like dollars are like oak leaves or something...
...Of course - CryptoCurrency is about to rock Finance to the core...

James Corbett is busy investigating new social media models right now the issue now seems to be: ways to draw users. a couple of them are using cryptocurrency to do it. with currency you have gaming though.

Is the Tech behind fb, iTunes &tc. really so exclusive & unable to be replicated? One thing they say about CryptoCurrency : the Encryption takes a lot of electrical energy: ServerFarms have big impact...